Filmmaker Jason Osder was only 11 years old in 1985 but he remembers how one of the most notorious chapters in Philadelphia history had a strange impact on him.

As Osder was attending middle school in Conshohocken, a massive fire was destroying the headquarters of the black separatist organization MOVE on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. The blaze, which began after police dropped a bomb on MOVE’s row home, took the lives of five children and six adults, and destroyed 61 homes on the block.

Even though Osder was across town, he still recalls seeing billows of smoke in the sky. Later he watched hours of TV news reports chronicling the days-long siege.

“I remember thinking there were kids my own age, miles down the road from me, who were dying,” recalled Osder, 39. “It was freaky ,,, and frightening.”

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The story of the May 13, 1985 standoff never left Osder’s mind and a decade and half later when he was mulling over ideas for his debut documentary, he opted to investigate the event in a feature-length film.

“Let the Fire Burn,” which is now playing in Philadelphia, has already garnered praise on the film fest circuit. New York called it “electrifying,” Filmmaker Magazine hailed it “a masterpiece ... that should be seen far and wide” and the Los Angeles Times dubbed it “incendiary.”

The film delves deep into the long-standing conflict between MOVE and the City of Philadelphia. Founded by John Africa in 1972, MOVE has been described as both a back-to-nature movement and a black liberation group. In 1978, the radical organization and the Philadelphia police had a shoot-out that led to the death of an officer. Nine members of MOVE were arrested and convicted on third degree murder charges. (MOVE maintained the officer was killed by friendly fire).

After relocating to a row home on Osage Avenue, the organization seemed to grow more radical. Neighbors complained that members of MOVE were making profane speeches via bullhorn and that the children raised in the MOVE compound were being neglected.

When members of the organization constructed a bunker and posted a sniper on the roof, the Philadelphia authorities decided to take action.

On May 13, police pumped thousands of rounds of gunfire as well as tear gas into the house. When the MOVE members still refused to leave, explosives were dropped on the roof from a helicopter in an effort to destroy the bunker. The bomb sparked a blaze, and police made the ill-fated decision to “let the fire burn.”

Osder believes there’s a possibility that MOVE members provoked the City of Philadelphia in hopes of instigating the type of conflict that ensued.

“There’s a point of view that says they wanted to show what they thought was the true nature of the system,” said Osder. “But did the response go beyond MOVE’s expectations? Did they want to demonstrate this to the point of dying in that house?

“Some people say they did. Some people say they were intentional martyrs ... Some people call it a mass suicide, and some people call it a lynching. And there’s something to both points of view.”

Osder began working on the film back in 2001 but almost instantly encountered resistance from Temple University, where many of the archived news broadcasts and commission hearings were housed.

In the meantime, Osder began interviewing a number of key players in the tragedy, including police officers as well as Ramona Africa and Michael Moses Ward (a.k.a. Birdie Africa), the only two MOVE members inside the home who survived.

A few years later, after landing a job as an assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, Osder once again began his quest to gain access to the mountain of archival footage.

“I needed the University lawyers to work with me, and the University letterhead,” said Osder. “I needed to have a strong institutional backbone, and also I needed to build my own career to a point where I had some leverage.”

Initially, Osder intended to make “Let The Fire Burn” a standard historical documentary, complete with interviews and vintage clips. But in 2010, Osder began re-imaging the project as a film made up entirety of found materials, including news broadcasts and public hearings.

“When the editor Nels Bangerter came on board, he sat down and watched all of the footage over the course of three weeks,” said Osder. “I had been collecting this footage and conducting interviews for almost a decade.

“But he got a fresh look at it ... and he helped me realize that the (modern-day) interviews with Ramona and Michael weren’t that revealing. They didn’t offer any new insights.

“But Nels saw a special potential in the footage from the (commission) hearings to do what the talking heads or a narrator would do, which was to provide context and background and also to move the story forward.”

Osder decided that using only vintage footage would give the film an unusual degree of suspense.

“In a traditional documentary, when you cut to a talking head, the air goes out of the tire, so to speak. The audience relaxes because someone is going to explain the situation to them.

“I didn’t want that, right? I didn’t want to let the audience off the hook. I wanted to keep the tension building.”

Another key moment for Osder was discovering a video deposition of the teenage Michael Moses Ward (who died recently at the age of 41.) In some ways, the movie seems to unfold from Ward’s perspective.

“When I saw the (attorneys) swearing him in, asking him if he knew what the truth is, I knew that was the opening of the film,” said Osder. “I wanted his point of view because Michael is unassailable. He wouldn’t know how to tell a lie ... He is just so exposed and innocent.”

During Michael’s testimony, he describes some of the MOVE members’ odd habits (like only eating raw food) while also revealing that he loved his elders and felt loved.

But “Let the Fire Burn” is no valentine to MOVE. Osder also includes footage of severely malnourished MOVE children as well as testimony from Osage Avenue neighbors about MOVE members’ disruptive behavior.

One of the most troubling segments of the movie examines what happened in the midst of the siege in the alley behind the MOVE home. As the fire raged, several members exited the back door of the house only to turn around and run back into the inferno. The documentary raises the question that gunfire possibly forced them to return to the blaze.

“I have no doubt that the people in the house believed they were being shot at,” said the filmmaker. “That weighs heavily on me believing they were being shot at, but I’m not 1,000 percent convinced of that. No one (in the police department) has ever admitted to shooting at them.”

The more Osder probed the alley incident, the more conflicting the stories became.

“At this particular moment, as well as at other moments, the stories never coalesce,” said Osder. “They never become clearer. In fact, they get less clear. I talked to Ramona and Michael years later and we tried, as an exercise, to mark (their stories) against a timeline and ... it never resolved itself.

“The more information you add, the muddier and muddier the timeline grows ... It’s like ‘Rashomon.’”

Given Osder’s obsession with getting “Fire” made, it’s a surprise to learn that he grew up with little interest in filmmaking. He attended the New College in Sarasota, Fla., as a social sciences and philosophy major and went on to work as a roofer, a bartender, a waiter and an investigator for a public defender before deciding to go back to school.

It was while he was pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Florida that Osder became fascinated with documentaries.

“After I worked with the faculty there, I began to see documentary as this really unique art form that’s political, and yet touches advocacy and journalism. It has a special potential to tell stories in a creative way and also engage with the world.”

Even though Osder is a newbie filmmaker, “Let The Fire Burn” instantly netted a national distributor in Zeitgeist, and has a good shot at being one of five films up for an Academy Award as Best Documentary. The film has already earned a Gotham nomination in that category, and it won the Best Local Feature prize at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

Key to the power of “Let the Fire Burn” is its ambiguity. Osder is well aware that much about the MOVE tragedy remains a mystery.

“It’s not a movie that has a clear-cut message,” said Osder. “It’s not an advocacy film but I hope that people are left with something they have to wrestle with, and that it causes them to ultimately look at the world more critically ... whether that means deciding to read the World section of the newspaper or picking up a different kind of book at the book store, or investigating an instance of injustice in their own lives.